Ideological Diversity Matters More than the Usual Kinds (with Ratigan)

[For those of you getting my RSS feed: I’ll soon start writing real blog posts about politics. For now I’m making videos accessible through my blog]

Dylan Ratigan and I talked about how to get people out of their righteous certainty. He used the metaphor of people being asleep (certain that they know) and awake (awakened to the true state of affairs, in which they realize how blind and arrogant they were before). He also said that good social networks are the key to waking up. I agreed enthusiastically because what he said matches so perfectly with what I wrote about the confirmation bias (in ch. 4), and how the only cure for the confirmation bias is other people, with different beliefs, who can look for evidence to disconfirm your beliefs. Our conversation then turned to the value of diversity, and how it is really intellectual and ideological diversity that matters — that can wake people up — whereas when people talk about diversity they usually just mean racial, gender, and ethnic diversity without any regard for whether these “diverse” people think differently. I was so pleased to have the opportunity to talk about the importance of ideological diversity, which I have argued would improve the quality of thinking and research in the social sciences.

5 Comments

A very interesting perspective on the never ending battle between left and right. Maybe those right-wingers aren’t totally intolerant and insane…….yes, I have an internal coordinate system that always makes me right.It defines my POV and it is my unconscious position, but I also use it for confirmation bias in picking out what I already know to be true. Yet everyone else does the very same thing….imagine that !

They’re very proud of their diversity, and tirelessly promote what they regard as diversity, but it’s a rainbow of groupthink, at least as much as in the social sciences, with numerous noticeably liberal hosts and correspondents of every shade and gender, without any noticeably conservative ones, and with apparently similarly uniform editorial leadership.

Here’s a story. The effects of editorial uniformity were strikingly illustrated a couple years ago when NPR casually changed its policy about how to refer to the sides in the abortion debate. Back when people were having prominent discussions on Nightline and elsewhere about how the sides could understand and work with each other, NPR followed the lead of those on both sides who were trying to be civil to each other and adopted a policy of referring to each side by its preferred name, “pro-life” or “pro-choice.” Some liberals listeners, who form NPR’s core audience, didn’t like this, as they object to the term “pro-life,” though not so much to the equally problematic “pro-choice.”

A couple years ago NPR’s obmudsman got the idea that these labels didn’t make sense, and talked to the news editors about it. The people who had instituted the old policy were gone, and no one could see the reasons for it. It seemed obvious that the old labels were misleading. They checked with other, similarly biased news organizations about their policies. In a couple days NPR changed its policy.

Now the sides are to be referred to as “abortion rights supporters” and “opponents of abortion rights.” By a miraculous logic, this is considered more neutral, though any decent PR person (and one would think any decent journalist) could see it favors the pro-choice side, essentially stating its preferred name in other words, while styling the pro-life side as anti-rights.

The ombudsman’s explanation of the change was shockingly oblivious: abortion rights are what the issue is about. That the pro-life side believes the issue is about the rights of the fetus never entered their minds. It was apparent that no one in the room, and no one they checked with, had a strong, well-informed pro-life point of view. That remains evident.

I love NPR (easy for a liberal to do), but their ideological monoculture does color everything, despite great efforts to be fair. Conservatives feel that easily enough, and don’t trust NPR as much or feel as welcome as liberals. It’s bad for NPR’s listeners, of course, but it also indirectly supports the likes of FOX, whose raison d’etre is to balance the likes of NPR. Bad leads to worse.

There are various theories about why politics are so divided today. I have the simple theory that it’s the fault of the voters, who keep electing polarized representatives. That, in turn, is facilitated and encouraged by our polarized media, where everyone can easily get their news from their own point of view. Having quality media everyone could trust, or at least something closer to that ideal, would help, but it would require getting greater ideological diversity on the staff, something NPR doesn’t see.

(PS–my ancient browsers, the latest versions of Firefox and Opera that will run on my ancient computer, don’t show the embedded videos here, and the link to Ratigan’s site doesn’t help.)